Crazy Hip Groovy Go-Go Way Out Monsters

    (TwoMorrows, 2003)
™ and © TwoMorrows

CHGGGWOM is a pastiche of monster magazines of a bygone era. The problem is that the parody is so dead-on that it’s not truly funny. A large portion of the magazine is composed of “stills” from fictitious B movies with bad pun captions. The average person (that is, one without encyclopedic knowledge of obscure monster movies) would be hard-pressed to differentiate between the contents of Famous Monsters of Filmland, any of its earnest imitators, and CHGGGWOM. If one parodies something that’s a bad kind of funny with the same kind of humor, is it bad or funny? That is the question.

The interviews are kind of humorous, in that the subjects offer replies one would not normally see. (This includes how “The Great Wanky Winklehausen” made all of his models from the same four armatures.) The letters column is — well, let’s just be kind and call it sophomoric. It suffers from that same kind of “too close to the source to be funny.”

The funniest parts are the ads, which are clearly parodies of something originally not meant to be funny. From “Classics 4 Illiterates” inside the front cover to a plethora of shlocky paperback books inside the back cover, the ads are a consistent source of chuckles. They’re just not enough to carry the total package.

— Jack Abramowitz
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